Steven Woolfe excluded from UKIP leadership ballot

Member of the European Parliament Steven Woolfe, once the frontrunner to replace Nigel Farage as UKIP leader, has been barred from standing for the leadership of the Euroskeptic party for filing his application late, its National Executive Committee said Wednesday.

A NEC-led panel met Tuesday, the party announced, and "by a clear majority" found Woolfe's application "was considered to be ineligible as a result of a late submission and as such he did not meet the eligibility criteria."

"His membership of the party was not in question,” the statement added.

The six candidates are MEPs Bill Etheridge, Diane James and Jonathan Arnott, as well as councilor Lisa Duffy and activists Phillip Broughton and Elizabeth Jones.

Ballot papers will be issued to party members on September 1, with votes counted and the winner announced on September 15, according to the BBC.

Woolfe, the party's migration and financial affairs spokesman, was seen as close to the former leader, who stepped down following Britain's vote to leave the EU in June.

His candidacy has been in doubt since he missed the application deadline for the leadership ballot by a matter of minutes, due to what his spokesperson said was a technical issue.

He was also criticized for failing to disclose an earlier drink-driving ban when seeking election as a police and crime commissioner in 2012, because, as he told HuffPost U.K., he “forgot about the conviction.”

Woolfe said in a statement Wednesday that he was “extremely disappointed” by the decision. He said the NEC had over the course of the leadership election “proven it is not fit for purpose and it confirmed many member’s fears that it is neither effective nor professional in the way it governs the party.”

News of his exclusion also sparked outrage among his supporters, including party donor Arron Banks who told Sky News that Woolfe's exclusion on a technicality was unacceptable, and felt like part of an agenda led by those in UKIP who never liked Farage.

Banks told City A.M. that “to exclude [Woolfe] because of a computer glitch on a website is insanity."

”We have been looking at whether a new party should start, which bits we might want to keep and what is the best way of doing things,” he said. “This has to make that more likely, because [the NEC] has just shown that they are not capable of running UKIP."

"Only UKIP could do it worse than Labour,” Banks later told Channel 4. “It takes some doing. They are in full meltdown."

Three members of the NEC quit in protest at the decision.

Victoria Ayling, Raymond Finch and Michael McGough issued a joint statement saying that as members of the NEC they had “been privy to the increasingly alarming behaviour of many on that board, leading us to conclude that the party’s executive committee is no longer fit for purpose.”

They asked members and elected representatives to support their call for an extraordinary general meeting to hold a vote of no confidence in the NEC.

Earlier this week, Farage described those currently in charge of UKIP as “among the lowest grade of people I have ever met.”

The NEC ruled last month that Douglas Carswell, the party’s only member of the British parliament, was ineligible to run for the leadership because he had not been a UKIP member long enough.

Founded in 1993, UKIP won 12.6 percent of the vote and one seat in the House of Commons at the 2015 general election, and 27.5 percent at the last European elections in 2014.